celebrity book club

Found a new bestie in the podcast ‘Celebrity Book Club’ with Chelsea Devantez, where her and a guest dive into discussions about (mostly women) celebrity memoirs. It’s everything I’d want to talk about in a book club regarding maybe my favorite book genre.

There are so many episodes where a quote from a memoir, a guest host, or Chelsea will give me pause and make me feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life to hear those words and that very exact sentiment.

Jotting them here to reflect on later. It’ll be fascinating to see if what felt so powerful and necessary at one point in my life will carry the same weight or meaning later on. Or maybe I know that someday, I’ll want these words hold me when I need them again.

I see a really intense value in the luxury of being able to introduce yourself, you know, and so many of us have things that enter the room before us or as we do and what people see and it’s you know all these issues about race and sexuality and size and how we present ourselves and how we speak and dress. I think so much of the work is in creating a space to say “What I’m here to actually do, should speak for me, and if given the luxury, allow that to be the identifier of who I am.
- Episode: Carry Brownstein’s Memoir: Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl

People really push you for information they don’t deserve and people often don’t realize how harmful smalltalk can be. And like smalltalk has plagued me my whole life, like any small talk answer I give you kinda shows how f***ed up and weird my life is… I really feel like it’s a measure of privilege when someone is like “So what do your parents do for a living?” and you try and get out of it, you’re like “Oh you know whatever, what about you?” And they’re like “No, what do they do though?” Because for some reason they think they deserve that information. And that’s just a measure of someone who, they don’t even have the reference point to know that sometimes, someone doesn’t have a parent, someone’s lost a parent, they have a job that feels painful to talk about… “Where are you from?” What if I’ve moved a lot? …Now I have to tell you why my mom moved us across states?
Yeah, you’re asking all these things that are identifiers of a very stable life. It’s like, do you want to open this book? Because it’s a long ass book.And also, you CAN open this book but you better know how to talk to someone about pain and if you don’t, get the f*** out of this conversation.
- Episode: Diane Guerrero’s ‘In the Country We Love’